To form the large mesh at the back, is still carried out with extrusions.
It should be noted that certain outer extrusions are stopped are early so you can go back and make them into a different strand

Three strands each with large dimentions.
Here it is necessary to spend time to adjust the vertecies to give pleasant forms.

The hairstyle in initial version, with Meshsmooth Nurms iteration to 1.

To finish modeling, it is necessary to add divisions along the wicks.

Use Cut Edges for that.

Make in the same way for the remainder of the hairstyle.

I would like to mention an irritating bug in max 4 that is present with the cut function.

The cuts have a tendency to not appear where your clicks instruct them to.

To correct that, you can add one To modify XForm on the object and collapse the stack (delete any meshsmooth first).
If you have an instanced copy on the go you will have to delete and re-clone this but now the cut should fuction fine.

With all the edges inserted, to be able to effectively adjust the LPM cage it is practical to hide half of the faces of the hairstyle.

For that select the faces then click the Hide button.
One can then more easily move the vertexes for with dimensions without being obscured by those from the other dimensions of the hairstyle.